arXiv AI

HARC: Coupling Harmfulness and Refusal Directions for Robust Safety Alignment

arXiv:2607. 00572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding how aligned LLMs internally represent safety is critical for diagnosing alignment vulnerabilities, as it explains why jailbreaks succeed and informs the design of robust alignment strategies.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

RAS: Measuring LLM Safety Through Refusal Alignment

arXiv:2606. 25750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is commonly performed by querying models with unsafe or jailbreak prompts and judging whether their outputs violate a safety policy.

By Chang-Chieh Huang, Yan-Lun Chen, Chia-Mu Yu, Wei-Bin Lee
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Large Language Models Generate Harmful Responses Using a Distinct Mechanism, Shared Across Harm Types

arXiv:2604. 09544v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) undergo alignment training to avoid harmful behaviors, yet the resulting safeguards remain brittle: jailbreaks routinely bypass them, and fine-tuning on narrow domains can induce ``emergent misalignment'' that generalizes broadly.

By Hadas Orgad, Boyi Wei, Kaden Zheng, Martin Wattenberg, Peter Henderson, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Yonatan Belinkov
arXiv AI
Sep 7

The Struggle Between Continuation and Refusal: A Mechanistic Analysis of the Continuation-Triggered Jailbreak in LLMs

The paper investigates a continuation-triggered jailbreak in large language models, showing that moving an instruction suffix can markedly boost jailbreak success. By performing mechanistic interpretability at the attention‑head level, the authors reveal that the jailbreak arises from a competition between the model’s natural continuation drive and safety defenses learned during alignment. They introduce Head Competition Steering (HCS), an inference‑time technique that exploits this competition to suppress harmful outputs and distill the approach into a student model for efficient safety improvements.

By Yonghong Deng, Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Xinyue Zhang, Zhongbin Guo, Chengzhi Li, Junxi Yin